


Knife of the Wind

by Elke Tanzer (elke_tanzer)



Category: Dune - Herbert
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2007, one of my best, recipient:imadra_blue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-24
Updated: 2007-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-03 01:10:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elke_tanzer/pseuds/Elke%20Tanzer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some are tossed by the wind, and others turn their edges to it, sharpening against the storm.  Character study of Alia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Knife of the Wind

Paul watches his sister sleep. He is tired, and still dusty from the day abroad, but she is beautiful, so delicate in repose. He is unsurprised when she stirs, though he has been quiet in observing her.

The tiny girl opens her eyes and regards her brother, solemn and all too knowing. Silent, she reaches out one small hand to him, and he leans closer to let her touch his face. Her perfect little fingertips lightly graze along his cheekbone, atop the ridge of his eyebrow, then draw gritty sand dust down the bridge of his nose.

Her eyes regard him with the history of ages behind them, and he wonders what it is that she thinks she sees.

The small fingertips catch his lower lip, slide down to under his chin, and he turns his head slightly at the apparent prompt. She blinks at him once, and then again.

Her tiny head tilts unsteadily to one side, then nods slowly downward and upward again. He thinks to himself, _if she were to talk to me, she would say that she knows me, but she is not seeing me. She is seeing those who came before, and seeing those who led to me._

* * *

Alia does not speak yet, but she has begun walking. The sietch is relatively quiet, and each morning, Alia walks. The Fremen who see her say quietly that it is as though she is relearning the motions, and nod to each other, _she is a Reverend Mother_.

She has an uncanny habit of disappearing from wherever she is expected to be, and appearing silently and suddenly in places no young child in the sietch would go, and this morning is no different.

Even in her earliest sometimes-awkward toddling days, she does not break anything of value, does not put herself in harm's way, and she peers about her surroundings with the most serious of expressions. Were she any other child, her behavior would be considered beyond the strangest of the strange, but she is Alia, the child who is also the Reverend Mother, and the Fremen accept her.

When one of them discovers her sitting alone, caressing the stone wall of the far, far passageway outside the quarters where, three generations ago, the old Reverend Mother made her home, no one questions it. They leave her as she sits silently, beginning to rock slightly against the wall, running her small fingers in patterns across the stone. The man merely passes the word back to the Reverend Mother Jessica's quarters of where her small daughter has chosen to walk this day.

Paul is the one who comes to find her this time. He sits down on his heels beside her, watching the patterns she traces on the unmarked stone. He thinks he recognizes a character here, a word there, and suddenly Alia turns to him.

He places his larger hand over her small one. She traces out three words, and mouths them silently. _Kwisatz Haderach comes_.

He cocks his head to one side, keeping her gaze, almost daring her to continue. She slides her hand from the wall, and carefully keeping his hand over hers, she reaches to touch his face. He squeezes her hand gently once, then lets his own hand drop to her small shoulder.

Her forehead wrinkles, and she purses her lips in concentration. The touch of her fingertips at his cheek become only a single finger, and it traces down his face, down over the edge of his jaw, and to the side of his neck. She breaks their shared gaze to look down at his hand, and almost before he notices he is doing it, his glance has followed hers, in memory of a sharper threat at his neck and flaming heat on that hand, and he has nearly missed reading her lips as she silently mouths one more word. _Foretold_.

He tries to get her to meet his gaze again, but her eyes have been drawn back to the unmarked stone wall beside them. She sweeps one small hand over the featureless surface, then rolls to her knees, and then to standing. She begins to walk steadily back toward their mother's quarters, only reaching out a hand to the wall for balance when her pudgy legs do not seem to be doing her bidding with as much decorum as she seems to expect. He catches up to walk beside her, but she does not reach out to him. Sometimes she takes the lead, sometimes she falls a step or two behind him, but once he catches up to her, she does not leave her brother's side... nor does she look to his face at all again that morning.

She does not trace out lettering on the walls with him again, and she does not seek him out at all, but after a few days, he finds that she will meet his eyes again, but she does not mouth any more silent words to him, or to anyone else.

* * *

When Alia chooses to begin to speak, it is suddenly in complete sentences, succinct, direct and in all ways Fremen in attitude. Only Jessica is really surprised.

The aged woman who looks from behind the three-year-old face regards her with calm acceptance. "What is, is, my mother. Abomination or no, I am."

The Reverend Mother Jessica can only nod, and open her arms.

Later that day, Alia stands on a rocky promontory just outside the sietch, the rising wind whipping through the wisps of her unbound hair. Paul comes to stand beside her, then takes one step closer to the edge. They watch together as darkening clouds of wind-borne dust and sand chase each other across the horizon, lit in the flame-rust tones of the setting sun.

Alia reaches one of her small, small hands to her own cheek, rubbing gently at the slight sting of windburn there, and speaks to her brother for the first time aloud. "With other eyes are oceans, forests, valleys and the cold dark of space, but with these eyes there is only Arrakis, and the sand and wind, Muad'Dib."

He thinks of Caladan, and of the sea spray on his face, and of the lives-which-will-never-be, for both of them. He tastes the dust of the desert, and can only nod.

* * *

She is four years old when she kills their grandfather.

* * *


End file.
